According to the National Association of Realtors, 72 percent of all people looking for a new residence start their search on the Web. This shouldn't be too surprising since you can go online and see multiple listings in the area you want. The buyer can check out the area, price, age, school district and other relevant information. They can see pictures of the home and in some cases take a virtual tour. The Internet has taken much of the legwork out of the house-hunting process.

The Internet has not taken the real estate agent/broker out of the process, such as many predicted in the mid 1990s, and others are still trying to do today. Of course, this implies that the seller has to make sure that their property is listed on the Web. Many agents already use this as a selling point to attract listings.

Having moved over 15 times and bought/sold homes in four states, I believe that a good agent is worth their weight in gold. I don't believe disintermediation, a fancy phrase for cutting out the middleman, is going to be a major issue for the real estate business.

That doesn't mean that an agent can just sit back and relax. The way to look at the Internet is as a new communications medium that is particularly well-suited for the initial phases of the house-hunting process. Just as in the past, signage and the real estate section of the local newspaper were ways to get to prospects. The Internet, particularly a real estate Web site, is how a large majority of people start this buying process online.

An agent needs a presence on the Internet in the form of a Web to be competitive. To quote an earlier Realty Times article by Blanche Evans "everyone else will adjust to a marketplace where real estate agents are hired for their expertise at handling transactions, rather than their lists of homes for sale."

However, what about online signage - the Website? We need a good Website, but just as importantly we need to get people to come to our Website. With signage and a local newspaper ad, an agent is contacted by people who are interested and are self-qualifying because of geography. With a Website you are competing with millions of other Web sites that are trying to get those same people to visit them. There are numerous ways to get people to a Web site including putting your Website in your e-mail signature line, putting the Website in print on your business card, signage, and newspaper ads, and having other Websites link to your Website.

One of the most critical ways of getting visitors to your Website is through the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL.

According to most research done in this arena, 70 to 90 percent of all Internet users start to find the information they are looking for by doing a query on a search engine site. You can even determine a relatively accurate number of searches for your products and service that take place on a daily basis using a service such as Overture or/and WordTracker.

But here's the real kicker, according to Overture's statistics, over a million people put in the search term "real estate" in October of 2003. When you add the term "real estate" with every State, County and City - millions of queries are being made every month! A conservative estimate would put the number of monthly real estate search engine queries at about four million.

It's not just a matter of designing a Website and publishing it to the Web - it's also a matter of having that Website come up as one of the first Web sites listed in the search engine (SE) results. Most research shows that most consumers don't look beyond the first page on the search engine. This statistic drops off after the second page. The ideal circumstance is to have your Web page come up when the search engine results first are shown to the end-user, or as they say in the newspaper business, "above the fold".

The whole art, craft, and/or science of getting your Website listed as high as possible in a SE is generally given the name Search Engine Marketing (SEM.) Search Engine Marketing is itself breaks down into two main methods - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Position (PPC). The best way to think about PPC and SEO is to compare them to your "basic listing" in the Yellow Pages and PPC as the equivalent to a display ad. The Search Engine industry likes to compare the basic listing to the "editorial" function in a newspaper but this is simply incorrect.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing is the field of getting the best position for your Website with the different SEs. The most important thing is to be on the first page of listings. Over 50 percent of all people will stop their search if they don't find what they want on the first page, the end-users tend to go to another search engine or stop altogether.

SEM breaks into two main methods. One is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and the other is Search Engine Optimization. (SEO).

Price Per Clickthrough

The PPC pricing model has two methods. The first is a bidding system. The higher you bid, the higher up on the Web page the hyperlink to your site is listed. This is how Overture and Google's "AdWords" work. The other is a fixed price-per-click, no bidding wars to worry about. This is how MSN/LookSmart works.

There are only four major SEs, and each has its own or PPC or partners with a third party. Google has its own AdWords program. Overture, which syndicates it's listings on other major SE like Yahoo!, MSN and IWon. MSN partners with both Overture and LookSmart.

Yes, this is confusing, and if you participate in multiple PPCs, a site could be listed more then once.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a really a collection of techniques to move your Website in search engines listing when you are not using the PPC method. Again, the most important thing is to be on the first page of listings.

Search engines classify Web pages one of two ways; there are human editors and/or software spiders. If an editor reviews your site, you are put in a particular category and there is less that you can do to effect your placement when a query is made.

If the SE uses software to analyze your site, the SE sends a program called a Spider, which "crawls" your site via the Internet and assigns a ranking to that site. When a user puts in the search term if the SE highly rates your site you show up on the first page. Here is a list of the factors that get your site rated well:

Published: January 27, 2004

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Jordan Glogau has been involved with marketing and sales on the Internet since 1995. He has worked for a number of computer and Internet company like DEC, Sharp and IDT. He was the President of RegisterFree, a domain name registration company. Has been involved with helping real estate agents and brokers with Web marketing and technology. This including search engine marketing, linking, strategic planning with estate portals like Realtor.com, and back-end programming to interface to National and local Multiple Listing Services. Jordan is presently doing Search Engine and Internet Marketing for the real estate industry and can be contacted at jglogau@phr400.com or 845-426-6864.